macOS Ventura preview: the march to continuity continues

The underwhelmed reactions began to roll in when my colleagues downloaded the public version of the software. One of my coworkers said that everything looked the same. One person said that this kind of sucks. The operating system looked and felt like it did in Monterey. Many of the most important features of this operating system are things that users may not know about.

Things might be worse. Unlike with Monterey, those significant features are all up and running in the prototype now, and they seem to be solid.

Ventura doesn't have a lot of bugs or glitches that ruin workflows or brick computers. I have had no issues with the operating system so far on my M2 MacBook Pro, despite the fact that you never know when a bug will show up. The changes I am seeing seem to fall into two of the agendas that Apple has been pushing with macOS over the past few years: bringing it closer to the mobile operating system and catching up with third-party competitors.

The continuity continues

Monterey brought some of the iPhone's key features to the Macintosh. Ventura has a camera called Continuity Camera. This feature allows you to use an apple device as a substituteWebcam for a mac that is running Ventura. This would be a reasonable decision for people to make, since the Mac computers have not- great cameras.

I will get you more impressions for the full review, but I haven't been able to test this myself yet because I'm still holding onto my old phone. My colleagues who have used the feature up report that it's no problem to set it up, and you can choose to use an external camera. When you call, the phone plays a sound.

When Mitchell Clark had the feature up and running with an M1 MacBook Pro, he hopped on a few calls with me. They looked better when using Continuity Camera. It was a bit unnerving to see their position change, but it was easy for them to do. Even though they were right next to their routers in both cases, they looked worse in FaceTime than they did in zoom.

The desk view feature has some issues. Desk View is supposed to use Continuity Camera to allow you to show your desk and face at the same time. Dan was shown his chest or lap instead of his desk when he tried this out. He was able to get it to show the desk by using his phone to tilt it. One could imagine how that would go. Apple has not yet responded to my questions.

Stage Manager is a new way to organize your apps and windows that you can use in Control Center. You can only have one open at a time, unless you group it with another app, and it took me a while to figure out how to do that. What you already have open is closed by opening something new. As someone whose work requires them to have lots of things open at the same time, Stage Manager isn't a good idea. It makes my Macbook feel like an iPad.

The System Preferences app has been changed to make it look like the settings app in Apple's mobile operating system. There is a menu on the left and a changing pane on the right, as well as a bunch of things hidden in the General tab. I think it will be easier to navigate for people who are used to the iPhone, though I don't like the fact that it doesn't seem to be resizing in any way.

Spotlight now looks a lot like the search function on Apple's mobile device operating system. Clicking the results I got from these searches sometimes didn't get me where I was, but now you can use it to run shortcut actions. It now includes images from the web and other apps. The results seem to be different. There were a lot of pictures of the horse. I received a picture of the cover of John Mulaney and the Sack Lunch Bunch even though I had just sent a picture of him to someone, and it was in my Messages app. I use Spotlight all the time and welcome any and all improvements to it.

Catching up

Almost all of the new features in the Mail app are things that the Mail app didn't have before. You can schedule messages to be sent at certain times, you can have the app remind you to come back to messages at certain times, and the app now automatically punts emails that haven't received responses in a while. Speaking as a long-time user of Gmail, which has had these things for a long time, I am happy that Mail users are getting them as well.

You can now add rich links instead of plain links in emails, which makes them pop up as small squares with the page name in the body. Users who don't use Mail see them this way. Text links can be sent if you prefer.

There are some updates for Apple apps that are in a race with other companies. You can now collaborate on share tab groups with other people, and you can also start Messages conversations from the browser, though I am not sure of the odds of that. Passkeys, a passwordless sign-in standard that stores keys on your iCloud Keychain, is one of the security features that Apple is introducing. It is now possible to change the passwords that are generated by the program.

New features that will be familiar to users of other messaging apps are included in Messages. If the recipient of the message is running the latest Apple software, you can mark them as unread and unsend them for up to 15 minutes.

SharePlay, which allows you to listen to music and other media remotely with friends, can now be activated from Messages as well. One thing that is cool to see in action but that I have never actually used is SharePlay, so we will see if the Messages integration changes my mind during the review process. Up to six people can be included in a shared iCloud photo library.

The optimistic view of this update is that Apple is finally acknowledging some of the ways that people have been using their Mac devices and is incorporating them into macOS's core function. People have been mounting their phones for video calls for two years now, and Apple now supports that. People have come up with a lot of different ways to distract themselves, and now they can do it with macOS. The cynical view is that Apple is trying to add features that other systems have offered for a long time. You can take your own opinion.

We are waiting for some issues to be worked out over the next few months, as well as the FreeForm app, which is supposed to deliver a more seamless collaboration experience than we have seen from Apple.

When I wrote the Monterey preview last year, there were a lot of unknowns. That is a sign of things to come. Ventura appears to be a solid step forward in Apple's journey to bring macOS closer to its mobile brethren. With features like Universal Control now live, the experience of jumping between the two is even more seamless. I wonder how many more ideas Apple will come up with before it puts a touch screen on a mac.